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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29291238">No wider than the heart is wide</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage'>salvage</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>M/M, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, but only Tozer, canon-typical descriptions of violence, mentioned past Hickey/Tozer, wound care</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 06:07:01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>12,045</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29291238</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage/pseuds/salvage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Were they to continue on like this, trudging through the featureless landscape of King William Land as unwilling and mistrustful allies, suspicious of one another but clinging together because each man’s fear of loneliness outweighed his fear of what the other was capable of?</em>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Solomon Tozer/Francis Crozier</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>The Terror Rarepair Week 2021</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>No wider than the heart is wide</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The hard, uneven floor of shale constantly slid and shifted beneath their boots, making it difficult to sledge and even walk over; every other step seemed to dislodge some loose pebble or other that shot out from underfoot and skittered away with the familiar hollow rattling sound that Solomon Tozer had come to so hate. The way the rocks laid loosely atop one another also allowed cold air to constantly circulate through the open spaces between them, so that no matter how long one laid upon it one’s body heat would never be caught by the earth and offered back as some little comfort: so Sol was cold when he awoke, head throbbing, the darkness of sleep not fully retreating from the periphery of his vision even when he blinked up at the cold faraway disc of the sun. He was tucked up against one battered side of the sledge, the worn and dust-dulled wood stained near black with what he suspected was his own blood. Sol just laid on the shale for a while, feeling all the ways his body simply wanted him to roll over and go back to sleep, to give up entirely on this endlessly cruel onslaught of day upon miserable, farcical day. Yet he was alive, and the same instinct that had kept him hauling despite his exhaustion, that had kept him focused and clear in Terror camp and, after that, in Hickey’s quickly disintegrating little mutineer camp, even after it had become obvious that whatever Hickey’s obscure goals were they did not line up with Sol’s own, that instinct to survive and to keep on surviving propelled him upward once again. </p><p>He nearly threw up; would have, had there been anything in his stomach, but as it was he clung to the gunwale of the sledge and let the waves of nausea pass over him, his vision narrowing to a pinpoint before the veil of darkness lifted and he saw the massacre before him. He could not find it within himself to be too sorry to see the disparate halves of Hickey’s body, his thin and ragged underthings coated with thick, dark gouts of dried blood and viscera; nor did he feel particularly sorry for the idiot Manson after remembering how he had shot Tom Armitage as the ground shook and the shale rattled with the approach of the monster. He recognized Hodgson’s lieutenant’s uniform, though none of the rest of him, and remembered how, weeks before, the lieutenant had looked from Hickey to Sol to the burlap bag of meat they had placed before him: so desperately in need of leadership, as they all were—and so, so hungry. </p><p>The beast’s body was ponderously huge, still and limp before Sol, its coat looking more like a worn and moth-eaten old pelt than the thick white fur Sol vaguely remembered it having when it prowled the ships. Its belly was grotesquely distended with what it had eaten; indeed, chewed and partially digested human remains spilled from its still-open mouth across the sickly shining shale. The boat chain that had bound the men together extended from within the monster’s slack mouth to the Captain’s outstretched arm, locking them together. Dried blood darkened the man’s torn waistcoat, from what Sol assumed was a mortal wound until he saw Crozier’s chest rise and fall ever so slightly.</p><p>Sol cast about for the keys that would unlock the shackles, trying to remember who had had them: he had unlocked his own wrist, focused and intent with the adrenaline of battle coursing through his body, and traded the ring of keys for the rifle the Captain had tossed toward him. He had brought the rifle up to his eye, sighting the monster, approaching and then stilling himself as he had been trained. Breath. Finger to the trigger. Breath. He would buy the Captain the time he needed. Even if it was just Sol and the Captain: he was a Royal Marine, and the Captain was, for all his faults, still a Captain. And then the monster’s gigantic paw coming at him, the gnarled, callused pad of it and three-inch-long gray-black claws, so slowly and clearly he thought surely he would have ample time to dodge out of its way. The collision knocking the wind from his lungs. And then nothing.</p><p>There was a clear path through the loose shale where many bodies had been dragged, dull gray stones smeared with blood and gore; following this, Sol found the place where Tom’s keyring had landed, likely jerked from the Captain’s fingers as he was dragged along the line of the chain toward the beast. Sol grabbed the ring and it seemed, nightmarishly, to dissolve beneath his fingers: no, that was just dried blood flaking off the metal and fluttering like ash onto the shale. </p><p>Captain Crozier looked to be in a bad way, dried-dark blood from the claw wound on his chest staining his clothing and plastering it to his skin so Sol couldn’t tell what was bloodied, crumpled fabric and what was the man’s shredded flesh. When Sol knelt to unlock his wrist the shale slipped beneath his bruised knees, sending waves of pain crashing through his whole body. He pressed two fingers to Crozier’s pulse. His exposed hand and wrist were cool to the touch but the vein beneath the skin thrummed: undoubtedly alive. Mottled bruises darkened the base of the Captain’s hand and his wrist, disappearing beneath the sleeve of his shirt. When he had unlocked the manacle Sol threw the shackle as far across the shale as he could. </p><p>“Captain,” Sol said, patting the captain’s cheek to wake him. “Captain.” Crozier’s bruised face twitched in an expression of pain. Sol patted his cheek again, harder, and then fully slapped him. “Captain.” </p><p>Captain Crozier’s eyes blinked open; he at first looked confused and consternated, as though he had wished to awaken to some different world than that which currently plagued them. Sol knew the feeling. Then awareness dawned and the Captain’s pale eyes focused on Sol’s face. “Sergeant?” the Captain croaked. </p><p>“Yeah,” Sol said. “Let’s get you up.” </p><p>Sol eased the Captain into a sitting position. The Captain gasped and grunted, pain wracking his expressive face, tremors coursing through his body as he dragged his heels over the shale with that familiar sliding noise that Sol was well and truly sick of. With his knees bent and his arms braced atop them Crozier held himself gingerly, like a man afraid of shaking loose from his traitorous body an even worse pain than he was now experiencing. Sol let him breathe, glancing around the corpse-still landscape for anything that might become useful, or any other crew member who might still be alive.</p><p>The shale stretched unfeelingly away in all directions. </p><p>It was not unlike being on a ship, Sol reasoned as he helped the Captain to his feet: they were adrift in a featureless landscape in which no succor could possibly be found. Each time Sol stood that black veil again came over his vision and he thought, for a moment, that he might lose consciousness entirely, but in the time it took Crozier to adjust to standing the veil had receded and Sol directed them back toward camp. Crozier leaned on Sol and Sol, likewise, found himself leaning more heavily than he would perhaps have liked against the Captain’s stout and sturdy body. He was just so tired, and he ached so badly, and when he moved his head too fast the gray horizon swam before his eyes, and Crozier, despite his obvious pain, was steady beside him. </p><p>The tents of the mutineers’ camp were still and barren as tombstones against the rolling gray horizon, dirty sailcloth fluttering limply in the wind. Sol steered them around the north edge of the camp, away from where Dr. Goodsir’s body had been laid out on its board and barrels, toward his own tent, where he knew he had a canteen of water and some salted dog meat still hidden away in his rucksack. Crozier craned his neck to look at the pale and unmoving form of the doctor anyway, the gentle human curves of his naked body disrupted, cut away in jagged slices to reveal tender pink and red flesh and the stark white lines of bones. </p><p>Sol had eaten of him. He had taken the cool, rubbery meat of Henry Goodsir’s dead body into his mouth, worked it gently between his loose and aching teeth so that it softened, the freshest meat he’d eaten in weeks, and he had swallowed, swallowed it down. He had only taken a few bites before Hickey had hit him on the back of his head with his own goddamned rifle but he had eaten of it: he would always have eaten of it. Nothing could take that back. </p><p>Sol’s tent was small and smelled sharply of sweat and the thick animal musk of the close parts of a man’s body, the matted curls of hair at the underarms and at the join of the legs, but it was good to be out of the cutting wind and to lie—perhaps collapse was the better term—on a cushion of canvas and wool instead of on the bare rocks. The Captain also collapsed at Sol’s side. With a monumental amount of effort Sol reached out and dragged his rucksack toward the pile of blankets on which the both of them were seated, delving one hand into it blindly to extract the canteen of water. Without really thinking about it he passed it first to the Captain, and only after Crozier had tipped his head back and swallowed a few mouthfuls of water did Sol realize what he’d done. The Captain passed the canteen back and Sol drank. The rim of the metal container was cold against his chapped lips; the water, too, was cold, and a trickle escaped the split and peeling surface of his lower lip to roll down his chin, catching in the tangle of his beard. He brushed it away with the back of his hand and saw, in the dim sunlight that filtered through the open entrance of the tent, the black bruise that encircled his own left wrist.</p><p>He reached again into the rucksack and shuffled through its sparse contents until he found the little cloth-wrapped bundle of meat that was tucked at the very bottom. When he unwrapped it he felt Crozier tense beside him and had to dredge his own voice as from a great distance inside himself to say: “It’s not… it’s dog meat.” </p><p>“Is that where that dog went,” Crozier said with a note of dry humor in the hoarse rasp of his voice. He took a piece of meat. </p><p>Sol was struck with the baffling urge to apologize: specifically, Sol wanted to apologize for killing the dog. Neptune. As though that were even worthy of a mark in his ledger at this point; as though, within the profound depth and breadth of the wrongs he had done, that was what he needed to atone for. Perhaps it was the only wrong for which he could be forgiven. Regardless, the urge passed, and he and the Captain sat close enough on Sol’s little bedroll to feel the warmth exuded by one another’s bodies and ate salted dog meat. </p><p>“Those wounds should be seen to,” Sol eventually said.</p><p>“Perhaps,” Crozier said. The sun had begun to set, for the little time it stayed down at this time of year, and the inside of the tent was marginally darker than it had been before, Crozier’s face profiled against the diminishing light that streamed in through the opening of the tent. Sol watched him: the slope of his forehead and the bruise-puffed bulb of his nose, his cracked and peeling lips and the round curve of his chin, the loose stubbly skin of his throat. The Captain did not look at him. </p><p>There was a small medical kit in his rucksack; he had stowed what he thought he might need to have for himself and a few others, Pilkington and Daly and Tom Armitage, perhaps Diggle and Hodgson, too, if only because Sol felt guilty that they had gotten caught up unwilling in Hickey’s madness. This he now dug out of the bag and opened to reveal a few rolls of gauze, some cotton padding to stuff wounds with, a little brown glass bottle of Dover’s powder and another of something rather stronger palmed from Dr. Goodsir’s stash. Sol maneuvered himself around the still form of the Captain until he was kneeling before him. The blood that matted the Captain’s shirt to his skin had dried stiff in a way Sol knew would tear further at the wound if he tried to peel it off as it was. Standing again brought a wave of wooziness and that suspicious prickling darkness to the edges of his vision but he pushed through it, shoving the tent flap aside and going out into the twilit evening.</p><p>The cooking fire had burned out so Sol took the fire starter and flint from his trouser pockets and knocked them together, sparks flickering through the darkness until a flame took to the half-burnt wood still in the pit, which Sol then bolstered with scraps of wood from crates and broken-down barrels until there was a fire blazing brightly. There looked to be water in the pot suspended above it and Sol let it warm while he searched for useful things among the abandoned detritus of the camp. The stub of a beeswax candle in Hickey’s tent, not a tallow candle like the rest of the group had used; more medical supplies in a heavy mahogany box in Goodsir’s; and, to his grim amusement, a shallow white porcelain bowl with an intricate blue pattern around the flat edge, the kind he imagined would be used at a wardroom dinner had he ever had the status to attend one. Captain Crozier must have used these dishes before—might have used this exact dish, even, perhaps years ago, back when Sir John and Fitzjames and the rest of command were alive, when open water still cradled the ships like a mother rocked her baby to sleep in her arms. </p><p>When the water was steaming Sol poured some into the bowl and brought it back to the tent. He lit the short stub of the beeswax candle with a taper from the fire and watched it catch: sweet smelling, its light clear and bright, and without the rank, fatty smoke that sputtered from tallow candles. He paused just outside the tent, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness before ducking inside and settling, more by feeling and memory than by sight, again in front of the Captain, who had not moved. He placed the candle on a crate beside them, and the bowl of water, and the wad of gauze and little jar of finely ground salt and bottle of laudanum from Goodsir’s kit. He didn’t know whether Crozier would take the laudanum; it had been common knowledge among both camps that Crozier’s “illness” before they walked out was a long and violent detoxification, but what Sol could see of the wound looked wide and deep. </p><p>He soaked some gauze in the hot water and, leaning up on his knees, gently began unbuttoning Crozier’s waistcoat. He could feel Crozier’s chest shallowly rising and falling beneath his fingers. The material was warm from proximity to Crozier’s skin, falling to either side of the man’s barrel-shaped chest in two blood- and sweat-stiff curves. With the waistcoat gone it was even more apparent that Crozier’s shirt was nearly black with dried blood where it clung to the huge claw marks that rent his chest. Taking the wet gauze in one hand Sol pressed it to Crozier’s chest, feeling the solid mass of his body quake beneath the touch, watching rivulets of pink-stained water course over Sol’s own chapped fingers. When Crozier’s shirt was saturated Sol removed the wet, bloodstained mass of gauze and gently pulled the shirt from the wound. </p><p>There were three long, deep claw marks that stretched from just below Crozier’s right collarbone to the left side of his chest, carving through the pale skin of his chest and the soft fleshy curve of his pectoral. Crozier’s breath came shallow and fast as Sol peeled the fabric away from his skin, exposing to the cold air the ragged edges of the wounds and the tenderly pink inner matter of Crozier’s body. Quickly, Sol made a saline solution with the warm water and soaked more gauze with it. He glanced up at the Captain’s face, hesitating, trying to read his expression for either approval or disapproval of Sol’s clumsy caretaking but it was shuttered and distant as though Crozier’s mind were as far from his body as it could possibly be while he still retained consciousness. Sol pressed the salt-soaked gauze to the wounds. Crozier let out a guttural, wounded noise, his whole body flinching away from Sol’s touch. His eyes were still unfocused, gazing at some spot beyond Sol’s shoulder. </p><p>“Sorry,” Sol muttered. </p><p>Crozier grunted, which Sol took as, if not encouragement, at least acquiescence. </p><p>Sol gently cleaned the claw marks with fresh gauze, glancing every so often up to Crozier’s face which was now tense with pain, eyes tightly closed. Sol leaned back to examine the washed-clean wounds and, although they were wide in a way Sol knew would leave ugly scars, they looked about as clean as they could get under the circumstances. Sol examined the torn material of the Captain’s shirt in the dim candlelight but there didn’t seem to be any pieces missing, still caught in the wound and ready to set infection slinking through the Captain’s strong stout body. </p><p>Bandaging him up would be a challenge in and of itself: Sol had barely enough clean gauze to cover and wrap the wound when accounting for the broadness of the Captain’s chest and shoulders, and they would have to remove the Captain’s shirt entirely in order to wrap the bandage around his body. Sol was neither afraid of nor unfamiliar with such closeness with other men’s bodies; even if he had had some reservations about it the years spent in such close quarters on an iced-in ship would have quickly eroded any sense of personal space. Yet it was strange to be this close to Crozier, half-undressed and with his wind-chapped hands touching the man’s bare skin, for quite so long, perhaps because of the rank difference between them, or perhaps, Sol thought wryly, because he had rather recently had Sol arrested and ordered him hanged for mutiny. </p><p>Sol didn’t hold it against him. He would have done the same, in the Captain’s position.</p><p>The concept of regret held much less weight than it ever before had to Sol, considering that the circumstances under which he had been operating the past few years were so profoundly extenuating that a word associated with a night of hard drinking and an ill-advised fuck seemed so paltry as to be entirely inapplicable to his life at the present juncture. Furthermore, he couldn’t honestly say he regretted having mutinied; with what he now knew of Hickey’s true intentions he might not have made the same decision given the choice to repeat his actions, but he still would not condone much of what the Captain had done during their time on the ice and the awful walk to where they now were. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that everything would have turned out well had his group stayed with Crozier’s. Perhaps it would have ended badly in a different way, but he couldn’t, now, see any outcome of the whole goddamn mess that was not some form of massacre. He would never have been able to save his men, nor any of the rest of them. Believing otherwise was just another way to drive himself insane.</p><p>The Captain’s shirt came off, in painful fits and starts, with Sol sliding his chapped and rough hands across great swaths of the Captain’s soft bare skin. Crozier was pliant, almost relaxed but for the glazed and distant stare that spoke to the strict internal partitioning of a profound amount of pain. Sol knew the feeling. He had just enough gauze to secure a pad of it to the Captain’s wounds, rolling the length of the rest around his chest and across his shoulders like a terrible facsimile of the white cross that distinguished the Marines’ uniforms. Getting the Captain’s shirt back on was only slightly less of an ordeal. </p><p>“We should sleep,” Sol rasped. </p><p>“Yes,” Crozier said faintly. </p><p>“Do you want,” Sol asked, holding up the little bottle of laudanum so Crozier could see the label. </p><p>“Oh,” Crozier said, eyes focusing on the bottle. “Yes. Please.” </p><p>Sol fished a spoon out of the rucksack and held it as steady as he could while pouring a few drops from the bottle; a tremor ran through his whole arm and he spilled the first drop he poured but he braced his elbow on his knee and the next few drops came out cleanly. Crozier watched the bottle and the spoon, the gleaming semiopaque fluid that passed between them. Sol found himself wondering whether the Captain’s steward would have done this for him in the past: a steadier and more practiced hand, perhaps, in handing the spoon to the Captain, or perhaps bringing it to his mouth himself. Crozier took the spoon from Sol and grimaced as the bitter taste washed over his tongue. </p><p>They got the Captain comfortable on the little bedroll and Sol covered him with a woolen blanket. His eyes closed nearly as soon as he laid his head on the bundled coat that served as a pillow. Then Sol was alone, or as alone as one could be beside a sleeping person, sitting on the very edge of the pile of blankets, with the cool nighttime breeze trickling into the tent through the open flap. Sol extinguished the candle and sat in the darkness for a long while, glancing intermittently to the dimly moonlit landscape he could see outside, listening for anything he could hear: but it was silent, without even the fluttering of canvas in the breeze, the shifting shale finally blessedly still. </p><p>The monster was gone, as was everyone Sol knew of who had survived this long on their ill-fated expedition. Perhaps the following day he and the Captain would go west, or south, trekking across the featureless gray landscape in search of other survivors. Perhaps the following day the Captain would kill him with his own hands. Sol considered both options, and considered the spoon and the laudanum, and swallowed two drops of laudanum, his hands shaking even more than they had been before, spattering drops of the liquid all over his trousers. He clumsily forced the cork back into the little neck of the bottle, put the bottle on the crate beside the blood-pink water in the porcelain bowl, and laid himself beside the Captain on the bedroll, careful to tuck his hands close to his sides so he didn’t accidentally touch the Captain’s freshly bandaged chest. </p><p>Sol slept dreamlessly.</p><p>When he awoke the Captain was still asleep and the anemic sunlight streamed weakly through the gap at the entrance to the tent. Sol’s entire body ached, not just in the exhausted, starved, and lead-poisoned way he was used to but with the unmistakable persistent strain that came in the aftermath of violent activity. Sitting up brought the now-familiar wave of nausea and fluttering dark spots that crowded the periphery of his vision and Sol breathed through it, then stood and breathed again through its return. He pushed the tent flap aside and went outside to piss. </p><p>The camp was untouched, at least from what Sol could tell, tents still fluttering emptily, crates and dishes and glaringly red cans strewn about on the shale. Sol ducked into each tent to briefly scavenge anything he could use: some more bandages, a few canisters of water, two more rifles and some shot. He skirted widely around the ghostly pale form of Goodsir’s violated body. There were still tin plates displaying chunks of pale pink meat laid around their improvised table. Sol went back to his tent. </p><p>They spent two long arctic summer days like this, the Captain near-senseless, taking a drop of laudanum when he couldn’t bear the pain, Sol checking the bandages that wrapped his chest and changing them when the white fabric turned to a filthy brown with dried blood and the clear yellowish fluid that seeped from the edges of the wounds. He tended to his own injuries, too, wrapping and re-wrapping all the old wounds that scurvy had opened again, the knife wound near his elbow and the big gash on his calf from when he was a boy and his missing toes, the broad section of his palm that had been ripped off when he had touched with his bare hand the metal surface of one of <em>Terror</em>’s cannons in subzero weather on the night the beast had chased Mr. Blanky up the mainmast. </p><p>When he was not tending to the Captain or to himself Sol haunted the deserted camp, methodically searching through the remnants of his crewmates’ lives for what he might use: more woolen blankets, a passably clean linen shirt that might fit the Captain, a hunting knife with a sleek leather sheath, a few hardtack biscuits neatly folded in a handkerchief. He also found things he had no use for: a pocketwatch, a battered notebook, a small gold-plated ring inset with little glass beads. A long and pointed shard of glass with thick gouts of near-black blood darkening its edges. These he left where he found them. </p><p>On the third morning, Sol watched consciousness come over the Captain’s expressive face as he woke, and pain soon after, the flutter of eyelids and tightness of jaw, that minute furrow of still faintly bruised brows. But the Captain’s eyes, when he opened them, were clearer than they were before, and today he breathed more easily than he had, no longer limiting each breath to shallow little sips that would not disturb the torn skin of his chest. </p><p>Sol helped him drink cool water from a tin cup and then, supporting him with both hands, helped him to fully sit up. “Careful, now,” Sol said as Crozier handled his body gingerly, testing the limits of his pain. “How do you feel?” Sol eventually asked. </p><p>Crozier rolled his shoulders, that wince of pain again crossing his features, and then delicately brought a hand to the bandages that padded his chest. “No worse,” he said carefully. </p><p>“Good,” Sol said, and then, for lack of anything else to say, “good,” again. He was unsure how much Crozier remembered and not particularly anxious to find out. He unwrapped the dog meat and they ate it in uneasy silence. Were they to continue on like this, trudging through the featureless landscape of King William Land as unwilling and mistrustful allies, suspicious of one another but clinging together because each man’s fear of loneliness outweighed his fear of what the other was capable of?</p><p>“Is it just us?” Crozier eventually asked. </p><p>“Yes.” </p><p>“Ah,” Crozier said, as though Sol had confirmed something he had already known. It was quiet for a while longer, and then Crozier said: “I don’t blame you, you know.”</p><p>It was, Sol thought without actually having been able to articulate the thought a moment before, the worst thing the Captain could possibly have said to Sol. He felt himself go unnaturally still, as though in sight of the lumbering, bloodthirsty beast once again, only now there was no beast: there was only Sol, and there was only the Captain, who mere weeks ago would have gladly put a noose around Sol’s throat and kicked the crate out from under his feet. </p><p>“I never—” Sol’s voice gave out before he could complete the thought, unsure, even, of how he had intended to complete it. He swallowed thickly. </p><p>“You only did what you thought was best for your men,” Crozier continued, calm and steady like he wasn’t flaying Sol open with each word. </p><p><em>Stop</em>, Sol wanted to say, but his throat felt too strange and full to speak. <em>I don’t want this.</em> </p><p>“I knew you had been taken in, too. You were only to serve as an example for the rest, on account of your rank.” </p><p>Sol’s stillness had broken into violent tremors. </p><p>“You did well, at the end,” Crozier said. “I could see you only wanted to keep them alive.” </p><p>Sol buried his face in his rough, wind-chapped palms and shook, feeling great heaving shudders tear through his body with each gasping and desperate breath he took. “Fuck,” he croaked, thinking, instead, <em>don’t</em>. </p><p>And then, as though Crozier had some view to the rawest inner spaces of Sol, he reached out and put his warm hand on Sol’s shaking shoulder. Sol thought of them all: of Daly and Pilkington, who had been with him until the end, loyal Marines whom Sol had promised he’d see through to safety; of Hedges, who had been a solid and faithful Corporal and whose naturally peaked and squinting features had broken into an unabashedly wide grin every time one of the privates told a particularly raunchy joke; of Wilkes, who particularly enjoyed telling such jokes; of Hammond, whose nervous devotion to shipboard structure had always set him slightly apart from the rest of the Marines, but who laughed and took his meals and shared watches with them all the same; of Bill Heather, his easy laugh and easier smile, who was continually joking that he should cut his rations himself or he’d have to request Mr. Gibson add another panel to his uniform jacket, and as there was no excess red fabric on <em>Terror</em> he’d be the sole calico Marine. And Tom Armitage, recently made Private by Sol himself on merit alone, who had admired the rest of them with such clear fervor, and who, Sol suspected, would have followed Sol to the ends of the earth had Sol requested it of him. Crozier’s hand was broad and steady on Sol’s shoulder, his fingers squeezing slightly when a particularly violent tremor ripped through Sol’s body as though it was this small single touch alone that held Sol together through this storm he wasn’t sure he could weather. </p><p>“How do you do it?” Sol asked weakly, too overwhelmed to be embarrassed about how his voice broke at two separate places in the sentence. </p><p>“Remember them,” Crozier said. </p><p>Sol scrubbed his hands over his face roughly, fingers catching in the unruly and tangled curls of his overgrown hair, the cracked, callused heels of his hands mussing his soft beard to further disarray. “Jesus.” </p><p>“Now multiply that feeling by one hundred thirty two,” Crozier said, without enough dry humor to disguise the despair in his voice. </p><p>“What do we do?” </p><p>“Continue on,” Crozier answered immediately, as though he had already examined every angle of the issue and discovered this to be the sole option. As though it were even possible. </p><p><em>Why?</em> Sol wondered, and then, because they were at the end of all things, he voiced it: “Why?” </p><p>The tent was quiet for long enough that Sol dragged his hands down his face once more and then looked over at the Captain. Perhaps this was what Crozier had been waiting for, because when he caught Sol’s gaze he held it steadily, serious and unafraid. “Would you lie down and die, after all this?” </p><p>Sol looked at him: the mostly healed bruises that marred the bridge of his nose and still faintly circled one eye of which the yellowish sclera was speckled with red, the starkly white bandages that wrapped his chest beneath the dull and dirty linen shirt he wore, his short ruffled gray-blond hair and the sad slope of his mouth. Sol wished, suddenly, that that beast’s huge paw had crushed Sol entirely during that last confrontation, or that its wide mouth with those thick blunt teeth had cracked his skull like an egg; or that, on a far distant, strangely dark and fog-clouded day, Crozier had hanged Sol before Hickey. Sol would not have made some speech as Hickey had, stalling as though he knew the monster would tear through the camp like a summer storm. It would have been quick, and easy, and he would have had no choice in the matter: he would have done his duty like he always had, unthinking, loyal to the last. </p><p>“No,” Sol said. </p><p>They scavenged what they could from the camp and left the rest. Crozier insisted on building a sort of funeral pyre for Goodsir, which Sol silently assisted with, and then they walked across the ever-shifting shale as greasy smoke billowed up toward the sky behind them. It was quick with just the two of them and what they carried on their backs: Sol felt as though they traveled miles in no time at all, each dune and huge sloping hill of the strange landscape drifting past them so quickly it was as though they were on a boat on the open sea once more, rolling waves bearing them ever forward. </p><p>Then, in the distance, the familiar peaks of more canvas tents jutted up from the shale, and their steps quickened, the barrel of Sol’s rifle bumping more insistently against his thigh as he climbed a hill to gaze down toward the little half-circle of tents. There was a body laid out on the shale before one of the tents, clad in dirtied white underclothes, partially outstretched arms bracketing its head like the man had been crawling forward when he had died. </p><p>Crozier made a strangled noise beside Sol. Sol squinted against the gray light, trying to make out whatever the Captain was seeing that Sol couldn’t recognize. They descended the slope together, Crozier at a swift enough pace that dislodged rocks skittered down the slope before him, sometimes shifting under his feet abruptly enough for him to lose his balance and flail wildly for a moment. Sol followed more slowly, so when he reached the tents Crozier had already fallen to his knees beside the dead man and was gently brushing the hair back from his face. Sol finally recognized the Captain’s steward, lately made third lieutenant to general dissatisfaction. But Sol thought maybe he understood the Captain’s motivations a little better seeing the tender way Crozier touched him: he thought of Tommy Armitage and turned away, watching the clouds swiftly cross the gray sky. </p><p>They burned those bodies, too, dragging them from the tents and stacking dry bits of crate around them, and the clash of the flint and steel of Sol’s fire striker sounded very loud when he hit them together two, three, four times before a flame caught. Crozier watched the flames for a long time before finally turning and continuing south. When they could walk no longer they made camp, pressed close together inside the little half-tent they constructed from what few materials they could carry with them, and when Sol gently peeled the blood-soaked bandage from Crozier’s wounds they both pretended his ruddy and wind-burned cheeks were not glistening with tears. </p><p>It was not much further south from there that they found the next camp. If the previous one had been a study of despair, this was a study of desperation: a leg, still booted, protruded from a burned-out fire pit, and some splintered and scraped-white bones were scattered across the shale. With a morbid but detached fascination Sol stared at it for a long time, trying to determine whose leg it had been. It wore an officer’s boot. </p><p>Crozier had crawled into a half-collapsed tent in which a row of still bodies laid like newborn puppies suckling at their mother’s teats. Sol crouched down to peer inside, looking past a fluttering corner of dirty canvas to see if he recognized any of the gray and emaciated faces. But one of them, Sol realized with a start, was still alive, his familiar face grotesquely festooned with what looked to be a watch chain pierced directly through frostbitten flesh, the heavy weight dragging down the loose and bruised skin of his cheeks, and when Crozier tucked his near-dead first lieutenant closely against his side Sol again turned away, unwilling to intrude upon this tableau of unutterable grief. </p><p>When night began to descend Sol set up his and the Captain’s little tent within sight of the camp and then waited there for him, listening to the wind whistle strangely through the debris of the abandoned camp. After a long while he heard the sound of footsteps coming toward the tent and a broad figure blocked the weak light that streamed through the opening; when Crozier entered he looked worse even than he had when they’d found Jopson’s body. Sol wondered if he had had to kill Little. He didn’t ask. </p><p>It was strange to feel overheated after so many years of hoarding each memory of warmth like a magpie collecting coins and buttons; even when Sol had sweated through all his layers with the exertion of pulling the sledges while wearing heavy slops the sweat had seemed merely to be a conduit for the freezing air, allowing it to worm its icy fingers that much more insidiously into the spaces beside his skin. Yet when Sol awoke in the bruise-black midsummer night he was hot, his sweat-soaked shirt clinging to the undersides of his arms and to his heaving chest. The warmth, he immediately realized, was caused by the closeness of Crozier’s body to his own in the low-ceilinged space of the tent. They were tucked together like spoons in a drawer, Sol’s face pressed to the nape of the Captain’s neck, his chest to the man’s back, bent knees slotted behind Crozier’s. Sol expected to feel—well, any sort of way, really, about this, except for how he did: a faraway but distinct type of relief. He was relieved to experience, in such an inescapable way, the aliveness of another person, and, moreover, the aliveness of such a person as Captain Crozier, sturdy and steadfast, who would have walked them all out if he’d had his own way, who had lost even more than Sol, <em>because</em> of Sol, but who had as good as forgiven Sol for all he’d done. </p><p>Perhaps, Sol thought for the very first time, Crozier was as glad to have Sol’s company as Sol was to have Crozier’s. They were neither of them the other’s first choice, or second, or even tenth, but there were certainly worse men to be alone with in such an unfriendly and desolate land as this. Sol trusted Crozier; trusted him, now, in a way he had trusted no one but fellow Marines for many years now. For all his many faults as a commander Sol was now unshakably sure that Crozier would prize Sol’s survival the way he prized his own. (Might the expedition entire have had a different fate had Sol, with his competence and loyalty and the unwavering might of the Marines behind him, thrown his lot in with command instead of Hickey? But this line of thinking would bring nothing to Sol so he forced himself to abandon it like the half-collapsed tents they left behind at each deserted campsite: of no use to anyone, and like as not enclosing only dead things.)</p><p>Upon emerging from the tent Sol saw some movement where the pale sky met the gray slope of the horizon, a fluttering and swooping speck of white that he took a moment to realize was a bird. He dived back into the tent, grabbing one of the rifles and some shot, awakening Crozier with his haste. </p><p>“What is it?” The Captain slurred, but there was no time for Sol to answer him.</p><p>Sol checked that the rifle was loaded and then jogged across the shale toward the little smudge of white that wheeled in the distance. It was a seabird that had surprisingly large, narrow wings with brownish black tips. The closer Sol came to the bird the larger it appeared, like something out of a dream. Were there gulls this large? He settled the stock of the rifle against his shoulder and lifted the barrel toward the sky, sighting along the length of it until he found the bird’s plump white body. It flew slowly, outstretched wings unmoving, simply drifting along the current of the air. Breath. Finger to the trigger. Breath. </p><p>An explosion from the gun and the bird fell from the air, landing on the shale with a heavy thud. Even from such a distance Sol could see that its previously purely white feathers were spattered with red. The bird, when Sol approached it, was enormous, its wingspan wider than Sol was tall. Yet it was light, in the strange way that birds are, and although its wingspan made it unwieldy to carry Crozier had already set off across the shale toward him. Together they hoisted it between them. Its body was still warm, its splayed-flat primary feathers stiff but the joint of its wing strangely soft and pliant in Solomon’s hand.</p><p>“Let us hope that this is a better omen for us than for the ancient Mariner,” Crozier said in that wry way of his. </p><p>Sol had long ago learned not to speculate about how much worse things could get.</p><p>The bird’s meat was rich and tender, plump mouthfuls of flesh that Sol and Crozier pulled right off the fire to eat, keeping the carcass rotating only distractedly so that some of the meat was overdone and some was too raw. Still, it was the most delicious thing Sol had eaten in years, actual years, and he and Crozier turned the fat-slick joints of thighs and wings over and over in their hands to strip as much meat as they could from the bird’s delicate bones, messily, mouths glistening. If one or the other of them occasionally let out a low, sated little moan it went unremarked upon. When he had finished Sol licked his fingers with a lazy luxuriance, sticking each one in turn into his mouth and sucking it clean with his eyes half-closed, laving his tongue across each slick digit to collect any remnants of the fat-rich juice that had dripped from the meat onto his skin. </p><p>After devouring the fat-rich meat of the albatross Sol was particularly hesitant to collect all the bodies from this final camp for a funeral pyre, but Crozier was already sorting through the debris that was strewn across the chaotic space between the half-collapsed tents so Sol followed him. Together they set the camp as right as they could and dragged the stiff body of each man out of the tents and into a crooked line, Crozier at each man’s head and Sol at the feet. He covertly tried to examine Little’s body when they brought it out into the light but all he could see were the man’s bruised and sagging skin and the way the chains shifted minutely over his wild, frost-whitened beard. </p><p>The scent of bodies burning did not make Sol hungry. </p><p>They proceeded south. </p><p>It was so easy for the two of them to walk with only what they carried on their backs, some bundled woolen blankets and just enough canvas to set up a half-sized tent, medical supplies and canisters of water and the bulky mass of the Captain’s greatcoat stuffed at the very bottom of Sol’s rucksack. With each step the barrels of their rifles nudged gently against their thighs. Free of the exhausting heaviness of the sledges and the slow pace of many men sick to dying Sol and Crozier crossed miles like it was nothing. Sol remembered Hickey’s words about fewer men traveling quicker and felt obscurely guilty to know that, in this matter at least, Hickey had been correct. </p><p>By the time the late-summer night fell they had begun to see small patches of greenery sprouting intermittently amidst what had previously been a monochromatic landscape, scrubby little grasses and the sage-green blossom of lichens coloring the gray rocks. They made camp in the violet-hued twilight, finishing the salted meat between them, sitting quietly on squares of folded canvas and looking out to where the southerly horizon became jagged and indistinct against the depthless indigo sky. Stars emerged overhead: first a few, scattered like a pinch of salt spilled across velvet, and then many, almost all at once, as though the sun’s disappearance behind the horizon precipitated some urgent gathering. Sol had never paid much mind to the stars, leaving navigation in the capable hands of those more skilled than he, but he looked for patterns in them now as though Nature or God had simply been waiting for Sol to pay attention before lighting the way home.</p><p>Home. It was difficult to remember the tight press of humanity that made up every overcrowded street of London, the constant din of voices and horses’ hooves and the clatter of cart wheels over cobblestones. The scent of burnt coal and excrement and tar and wet wool and boot polish and hot eel-and-pea soup. Near the end of each of Sol’s previous voyages he had begun to look forward to returning to England like a child anticipating the treats within his father’s Christmas-box, yet he felt no such anticipation now. It was wholly impossible to even imagine returning to London: to what? To a court martial? To be pilloried for having let his men die—for worse? To be hanged for mutiny? Or to be exonerated, improbably, only to return to another sea voyage—to command another unit of Marines, to sleep in a hammock in the musky, salt-sharp hold of another ship? </p><p>The thought haunted Sol even as he drifted toward sleep, tucked up beside Crozier in their low-ceilinged little tent which trapped the thick animal scents of their unwashed bodies all around them. Where were they going? If they encountered a group of whalers, or Hudson’s Bay Company men, would they beg to be swiftly spirited back to England? Would they—and here Sol’s thoughts entered previously uncharted territory—would they even tell them who they were? There was a strange comfort in the thought of disappearing along with all the rest of the crew, with Bill Heather and Tom Armitage, Goodsir and Pilkington and Hodgson and all the rest. Cornelius Hickey, or whatever his real name was. Wasn’t it what Sol deserved?</p><p>More foliage sprang from the ground as they progressed south, prickly grasses and twisted little shrubby bushes adorned with tiny pale leaves, huge mottled green-and-gray blooms of lichen with fluttering, twisted edges that peeled away from the stark surfaces of the rocks. And the jagged landscape began to hold more signs of life besides the increasingly dense foliage: little crawling insects and clear pools of water nestled between the slopes of rocks and the faraway calls of birds carried on the wind. In the distance, trees. </p><p>They heard the geese before they saw them, raucous honks and the flap of wings, and came up slowly over the crest of a hill so as not to startle them. There were eight of them, slim black-feathered necks curving gracefully up from plump round bodies, webbed feet skittering over the smooth stones of the small pond in which they bathed, half-outstretched wings creating arches from their bodies to the ripple-wrought surface of the pond like the flying buttresses of Papist churches. Sol laid on his belly on the ground and shot one, easily, the largest and plumpest of the lot, and when the report of the rifle echoed deafeningly across the landscape the rest of the geese took frantically to the sky, letting out wild, high-pitched screams, wings flapping. </p><p>The goose was even better than the albatross, its meat richer and softer, and Crozier was more careful to tend to the carcass on a spit over the fire so it was evenly roasted and had a piney, smoky scent from the bits of brush they burned to cook it. Eating had become a type of worship, kneeling before the fire with his hands clasped around slender fat-slick bird bones a feeling closer to prayer than anything Sol had experienced in a very long time. Afterward they scooped some water from the pond into their only cooking pot, set it to warm over the fire, and then scrubbed their bodies with the steaming water, hands and underarms and throats, thighs and crotches and callused feet. Sol noted that, in addition to the smallest two toes on his left foot which he had lost to frostbite two winters ago, several of his toenails had at some point blackened and fallen off without his really noticing. It was strange to be regaining awareness of his body after such a long time of dragging it like a miserable, aching thing from place to place, to be conscious of sensations other than hunger and pain: satiation after the pleasure of a good meal, the slimy slickness of a droplet of hot fat that slid down his wrist, the wetness and warmth of his tongue where he licked it off. The thin comfort of the pad of canvas and wool that he slept upon, the humid warmth of two bodies that collected within their small tent.</p><p>By midday they reached a little forest comprised mostly of slim-trunked pines whose branches dipped low to the ground, heavy with darkly shining clusters of fragrant needles. The first real tree they encountered Sol couldn’t help but touch, splaying his callused and wind-chapped palm over the rough living wood of it, smelling its sweet scent. The outside of the tree was beaded with little golden droplets of sap which clung stickily to his skin. He felt kind of insane about it, touching a regular pine tree like it was some sacred relic, but when he glanced guiltily over at Crozier the man was wonderingly running his fingertips over the scaly surface of a little pinecone. Sol watched him: the serious furrow to his brow smoothing to something as close to relief as Sol had perhaps ever seen on him, the delicate way he touched the shiny body of the pinecone, brushing the pad of his thumb over its tightly closed scales. The afternoon sunlight fell in one glowing strip across his face, illuminating his short blond eyelashes, the fathomless sky blue of one eye, the slope of his mouth and his stubble-rough jaw. Then Crozier slanted his gaze over to Sol; caught out, Sol couldn’t help but look back. </p><p>There had been a moment, blurred though it was by the adrenaline that soaked all such memories, during the great beast’s final attack on Hickey’s miserable little cabal, a moment when Crozier and Sol still chained together had ducked behind the safety of the sledge. The beast had taken Hodgson in its mouth and reared back, and Sol had heard, above the riotous racket of the beast’s huge paws grinding the shale and men screaming, the snap of Hodgson’s spine and the crunch of his ribcage collapsing. Sol had watched it kill him, the lower half of his body dropping heavily to the ground, and then it dived after Golding, its huge snout nudging the sledge aside to root him out from underneath like a clamdigger’s foot delving into the wet sand. Sol felt its hot, rank breath stream over him as it did so, stunned into inaction for a moment, and then Crozier had locked his arm around Sol’s chest to pull the both of them back to further safety. It had only been a moment, and then the both of them were jerked forward with the chain, sprawling painfully against the sharp edges of the rocks, and then the memory dissolved into frantic fumbling with the manacle keys and the calm stillness that always came over Sol when he was sighting down the barrel of a rifle. But that moment: the strength of Crozier’s thick body, the warmth of his skin, the way his fingers had curled in the material at the collar of Sol’s shirt, just for the briefest of seconds—</p><p>“I think we should camp here, by the trees,” Sol said. “More animals might come round.” </p><p>“Yes,” Crozier said, looking almost relieved. They ventured a little further into the forest, far enough for the line of trees to break the relentless wind and for the sunlight to become softly dappled by the ceiling of gently shifting and rustling branches downed with pine needles overhead. Sol watched Crozier, who seemed so different, now, than Sol had ever seen him before, with his stubble and his open-collared shirt, his weathered, wind-chapped face gone soft and awed in the mottled illumination of the pale yellow sunlight and green-tinted shade. But Sol was different, too, with his overgrown beard and the fluffy, unruly mass of hair he was continually shaking back from his frostburnt cheeks, and pine sap still smeared sticky and fragrant on the skin of his palms. </p><p>By some unspoken mutual agreement they stopped in a little clearing formed by the half-rotted trunk of a fallen tree in whose shadow a soft carpet of moss blanketed the forest floor. Crozier let out a quiet grunt as he lowered himself to sit heavily upon the moss and leaned back against the collapsed tree, tipping his head back and closing his eyes with a sigh. Sol propped his rifle against the tree and then sat next to Crozier, bending his knees and bracing his elbows upon them, letting his hands hang loosely within the vee of his spread legs. </p><p>“Jesus,” Sol breathed, immensely relieved. </p><p>But when Crozier spoke he sounded pained, more desperate than ever: “Close,” he said in a faint rasp. “We were so close.” </p><p>Sol rolled his head to the side to look at Crozier: face tipped up toward the sunlight, eyes still closed, the extended line of his throat looking particularly vulnerable so exposed as it was. “You can’t think like that.” </p><p>Crozier breathed out a sharp breath and brought his hands up to scrub at his face; Sol remembered doing the same in his tent in the mutineers’ camp. Had it only been a few days prior? Without any gift for speech Sol wordlessly placed one hand on Crozier’s shoulder, remembering how the Captain’s touch had grounded him when he had felt ready to fly apart in his grief. </p><p>“All that—all that time,” Crozier continued roughly, his brogue stronger than Sol had ever heard it before. “All those lives. For what?” </p><p>Sol couldn’t answer, just gripped Crozier’s shoulder more tightly, and then, when that wasn’t enough, tugged him toward himself. He didn’t have any real plan in doing so, but when he wrapped his arm around Crozier’s shoulders and Crozier leaned against him he found they fit well together, Crozier’s face pressed into the junction of Sol’s neck and shoulder, breath hot and damp against his skin. Sol brought his other arm up, gingerly avoiding touching Crozier’s chest but settling him more comfortably into his embrace. Crozier stilled and then, all at once, relaxed against Sol with a shuddering sigh that seemed to melt the two of them together. Sol’s chin settled comfortably against the top of Crozier’s head. An unruly curl of Sol’s hair fell across his face but, his hands being occupied, he left it to rest gently on the bridge of his nose, stirred by the fluttering movements of his eyelashes. </p><p>He had intended to settle Crozier with his clumsy, unpracticed touch in a way he could not with his clumsier and still less practiced words, but to hold Crozier’s solid, warm body against his own also settled something within Sol: he too breathed out a profound sigh and curled his body around Crozier’s, knocking their bent knees against each other’s, feeling the way their breaths stuttered, out of sync, before finding a rhythm together. Crozier was just so alive, his whole self trembling with life where it was pressed close to Sol’s, vital in a way that felt inexorable and impossible to refute, as though perhaps Crozier couldn’t be killed at all. Sol couldn’t stop his hands moving over the slope of Crozier’s shoulder, then ranging further, touching the soft skin below his ear and the round knob of his spine beneath the crumpled collar of his shirt, the line of one shoulderblade just perceptible beneath his worn-thin wool waistcoat. He dragged his fingers through the sweat-stiff hair at the nape of his neck and felt the way the curve of Crozier’s upper arm fit perfectly into the cup of his hand. Crozier’s breath came in quick, warm little puffs that Sol could feel skating over the skin of his own throat where his shirt collar gaped open. </p><p>If he ducked his chin just a little Sol would be able to press his mouth to the crown of Crozier’s head, breathing the musky and sweat-sharp scent of his body, so he did, his nose twitching when Crozier’s short hair tickled it. It was dizzying to be pressed so close to another person, another man, in such a way, and some base and primal hunger for it abruptly made itself known within Sol’s body. He found himself gripping the meat of Crozier’s upper arm tightly, breathing fast and uneven through his nose, each inhalation of the familiar scent of him just increasing Sol’s desire, not unlike the way the scent of the goose cooking over the fire had made his mouth water: the dumb animal of his body was ravenous and wild, slavering with want.</p><p>Crozier curled his fingers into the loose folds of Sol’s grimy shirt, tugging it taut so that the material clutched softly at Sol’s waist, and even this little contact made him desperate to be held more tightly, to have those fingers pressing against his ribs or the dip of his waist or the pointed peak of his hipbone where it jutted up against his skin like something straining to leave the confines of his body. He had never needed to be touched so badly, as though there were a physical emptiness within him that could only be filled with the steady and deliberate weight of Crozier’s skin against his own. </p><p>“God,” Sol breathed against Crozier’s head, tasting the sweat that stiffened the thin hairs there, “God, please.” </p><p>And then Crozier moved against him, hands scrabbling clumsily at his body, his waist, the slope of his ribcage; Sol grabbed him, no longer careful nor hesitant, tugging him up and splaying one broad hand against the side of his face to bring their mouths together. The kiss was frantic and desperate, as though the hunger Sol felt for Crozier could be sated by taking him literally into his mouth: his thin lower lip, clutched between Sol’s teeth, or the hot dart of his tongue. Crozier cradled Sol’s face with one broad, rough palm, brushing his thumb gently against the wild and disarrayed hair of Sol’s beard, and Sol pressed his face toward it blindly, wanting more, parting his lips for the gentle nudge of Crozier’s thumb. It was thick and callus-rough, the short nail jagged when it brushed the ridged roof of Sol’s mouth, and it tasted sharply of sweat and the metal of Crozier’s rifle barrel. Sol laved his tongue over it then hollowed his cheeks to suck, letting the soft planes of his mouth enclose it completely. </p><p>“Jesus,” Crozier rasped, and when he withdrew his thumb from Sol’s mouth to kiss him again he kept it tightly on Sol’s chin to hold his head in place, leaving a thick trail of Sol’s saliva to dampen his lower lip and beard. This kiss was deeper and less frantic, as though Crozier was now seeking to thoroughly explore all the hot hidden places of Sol’s body, to find and catalogue them—as though he knew that Sol needed to be entirely filled.</p><p>Crozier roughly tugged at the material of Sol’s shirt to splay his hand against the tense curve of his stomach and Sol shuddered beneath the touch, trapped between the heavy press of Crozier’s body and the collapsed tree behind him, trying vainly to thrust his hips up to gain some kind of friction. He locked one arm around Crozier’s back, pulling him closer, and the moss cushioned Crozier’s knees as he straddled one of Sol’s thighs, holding his weight above Sol’s body. Sol arched up toward him, raising his knee until he could feel pressed to the thick curve of his thigh the soft weight of Crozier’s stones and the curve of his half-erect cock. The angle made it difficult for Sol to feel any friction where he needed it most, prick straining against his loose trousers, and he found himself making needy, desperate little noises in his throat as though he could wordlessly request the satiation he craved.</p><p>Heat pooled between their bodies, under Sol’s arms and at the nape of his neck and in the tender space between his thighs where the unrelenting warmth of Crozier’s body bore down upon him. He writhed uselessly, his hands drifting from Crozier’s shoulders to the wide slope of his back to his soft waist, tracing the curve of his stomach. Crozier held him in place easily, a hand on his shoulder, one still exploring Sol’s chest beneath his rucked-up shirt and loose braces, one of which threatened to slip off Sol’s shoulder to trap his arm at his side. He found he did not mind the thought. Crozier touched his sparsely furred pectoral, fingers ghosting too quickly over the aroused bud of Sol’s nipple to chart the dip of his sternum from which his ribs protruded like spokes from a wheel. Sol blindly searched for the flies of Crozier’s trousers, scrabbling weakly at the buttons until he parted the fine wool material to free Crozier’s plump cock. It was thick in his hand, hot and silk-soft, and the foreskin slid easily over the hard length of it when Sol stroked it from base to head. Crozier bit back a moan and his hips stuttered forward, his cock moving in Sol’s tight grip. Sol stroked it again, curling his smallest fingers briefly over the head to catch the drop of slickness that spurted from it. </p><p>They did not kiss so much as breathe hotly into one another’s mouths, Crozier thrusting shallowly against Sol’s hand, too lost in the sensation to do anything other than loose lovely, quiet little moans against Sol’s parted lips. Sol pressed his tongue into Crozier’s mouth and Crozier opened for him, decadently, thin lips parting to allow Sol to explore the tender inside of him: darting tongue, soft cheeks, the hard line of his teeth. When Sol licked over them Crozier let out another low moan. Crozier was so responsive, shuddering and gasping with each twist of Sol’s wrist, his breath coming quick and irregular against Sol’s mouth and gently ruffling the soft curl of his mustache. This felt strangely indulgent, near decadent, unlike the quick and impersonal pull-off sessions Sol had had with Hickey which Sol had known were meant to prove his loyalty and lock them inextricably into mutinous collaboration rather than to provide pleasure for either of them. </p><p>When Crozier spent it was in great warm gouts that spattered the bare skin of Sol’s wrist, dripping thickly down the inside of his arm. Crozier panted heavily, still braced over Sol, eyes closed, but he opened them when Sol brought his wrist to his mouth and licked Crozier’s spend from his own skin. It was bitter and deeply salty like the sea, hot with the inner warmth of Crozier’s body. In the wake of it Crozier blinked at him, gaze unfocused and with those clear blue irises nearly obscured by the darkness of his pupils, his kiss-reddened mouth slack but responding lazily when Sol kissed him again. </p><p>Sol’s inner arm was cool and wet with saliva and the come he had not licked off but the rest of him was warm—was hot—sweat collecting in all the close spaces of his body. He reached down to his own trouser flies, fumbling with the buttons before unfastening them to free his aching cock. This was familiar: the weight and curve of it in his hand, the softness of the foreskin and the dense curls of sweat-matted hair at the base of it. His stones were already drawn up tight to his body, the warmth and surprise of this encounter bringing him close to the edge even without having been touched. His mouth opened and Crozier caught it in another deep, near bruising kiss, tongue invading Sol’s mouth, teeth hard against Sol’s swollen and kissed-tender lips. </p><p>One of Crozier’s hands drifted up Sol’s bearded jaw and the slope of his cheek to rest in the fluffy mess of his overgrown hair, gently, at first, until Sol whined at the touch and then Crozier tightened his fingers and tugged, sending white-hot arousal jolting so suddenly through Sol’s body that he quite abruptly climaxed, his orgasm crashing over him like a breaker upon a white sand beach: the wash of pleasure so distant from his present memory that he couldn’t even be sure he was imagining it properly, as though it were, like the roll and roil of the salt-sweet ocean and the soft glittering sand through which one could card one’s wondering fingers, confined to the realm of dreams, familiar only in the strange, detached way a location in a dream was familiar. </p><p>Crozier petted Sol’s hair, not carding his fingers through the tangles as much as gently tucking each fluffy lock behind Sol’s ear despite that they immediately sprang forward when he did so, his touch so solicitous and tender. Sol pressed his face into Crozier’s hand and Crozier stroked the scruffy hair of his beard into place with that same careful attention. When he finally opened his eyes Crozier was looking at him with an extraordinary softness about the edges of his features. </p><p>“Should set up camp,” Sol said quietly. </p><p>“It is a good spot,” Crozier replied, smiling like they shared some secret between them. </p><p>Sol supposed they did, scrubbing the spend from his skin while Crozier puttered about the little clearing setting up the length of canvas and two stout poles they had been using as a tent: the two of them alone shared uncountable thousands of secrets. They shared the secrets of the ships and the secrets of the crews; how they had suffered, surely, how they had died, but also how they had lived: packed tight on the lower deck of <em>Terror</em>, breathing the heavy air more thoroughly warmed by others’ bodies than by what heat radiated from Mr. Diggle’s hulking stove and the weak coal engine in the hold; how they had walked the ice-slick boards of the main deck during eerily blue-black Middle Watches, wigs and comforters obscuring almost all of their faces but still recognizable to one another as officers or subordinates, crewmates or messmates; how they had eaten hard biscuits and salt pork and the metallic-tasting contents of the cans that had been killing them, drunk grog and bitter tea and water that was like ice on their teeth; how they had celebrated birthdays and holidays and the particular anniversaries significant only to those on the ships, they day they had set sail from England, or that on which they had been frozen in, or the first sunrise of each year, that tantalizing little flash of bright warmth on the far horizon that disappeared as quickly as it appeared.</p><p>The little forest in which they were encamped felt so alive around them in the same way Crozier’s body had felt alive when he was pressed against Sol. The gentle movements of the wind and the distant flutters of unseen birds shook the thinner branches of the trees in the same way goosebumps had prickled over the bare skin of Crozier’s arms and belly, tiny tremors that gave the whole of his body a feeling of perpetually shifting dynamism; and the far-off intermittent shift and crackle of paws or perhaps hooves on leaf litter that echoed strangely between the trees gave the forest a kind of pulsing internal vitality not unlike that of Crozier’s heartbeat and the unsteady rhythm of his breath. Sol ventured away from their campsite, walking quietly as he could on the sparse leaves and twigs that carpeted the forest floor, rifle relaxed but ready in his arms as he glanced about for game. </p><p>He shot a rabbit, a small soft-furred thing whose little paws were still twitching when Sol retrieved its body, whose wide open eyes gleamed liquid-dark, fringed by delicate eyelashes. Its meat tasted earthy and gamey, rich with the warmth of its iron-sharp blood, fragrant from the pine smoke that drifted lazily up from their cooking fire. </p><p>“I never had caribou,” Sol said, stretched warm and sated beside the diminishing fire. “Never field dressed a deer neither.” </p><p>“Can’t be much different from reindeer,” Crozier speculated. </p><p>Sol felt his eyebrows shoot up and he rolled halfway to the side to look at Crozier directly. “You field dressed and ate reindeer?” </p><p>“Well, <em>I</em> didn’t dress the creature.” </p><p>“Ah, command, always claiming credit for others’ work.” </p><p>“I was a lieutenant at the time,” Crozier said mildly. “Actually Tom—Thomas Blanky—did the majority of the work. He was an AB.” He went quiet for a moment, lost in memory. “The way the organs of it steamed when they hit the ice, we thought it might melt clean through the floe.” </p><p>“How did it taste?” </p><p>Crozier shrugged with one shoulder. “Warm,” he said. Sol remembered the unrelenting cold that had, until so recently, seemed to have taken root in his very bones. He knew the taste of warmth: sweeter than sugar.</p><p>“Is it unlucky to say it can’t be that difficult?” </p><p>“Do not say that,” Crozier warned, failing to keep a grin from his expressive features. </p><p>They were already accustomed to sleeping pressed against one another in their little tent like spoons in a drawer but it was new for Crozier to reach out and seek Sol’s touch; new, too, for Sol to so easily fit his body against the warm mass of Crozier’s, nose to nose with him on the squashed bundle of Crozier’s greatcoat which Crozier used as a pillow, Sol’s arm around his broad soft waist, their knees clumsily bumping before settling together, interlocked. It was comfortable—comforting—to be held in this way, and to hold another body in turn, with the steady weight of Crozier’s broad hand splayed almost possessively on Sol’s shoulder. It was quiet in the tent for a very long while but Crozier’s breathing did not settle into the even, shallow rhythm of sleep, nor did Sol’s. The branches of the trees rustled quietly outside. </p><p>“Are we going back to England?” Sol asked very quietly in the warm humid space between them. He kept his eyes half-lidded, avoiding any glint of Crozier’s that might pierce through the near-total darkness.</p><p>“Do you want to?” Crozier replied. His tone gave nothing of his own desires away. </p><p>Sol breathed out sharply through his nose. “I can barely imagine it,” he confided. </p><p>“Nor I.” </p><p>Sol only then realized that he had just assumed he would follow whichever path Crozier chose for the both of them, despite that rank surely held no sway over them, despite that he knew that Crozier would allow him to go his own way if he wanted to. But did he want to? Overhead, above the filthy canvas of their little tent and the gently swaying needle-heavy branches of the slim pine trees that towered over them, were the stars, the obscure patterns that could be traced between them still impenetrable to Sol, but not to Crozier. Sol had never navigated with them, never needed to learn. Perhaps he still didn’t.</p>
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